"Nothing vivifies, and nothing kills, like the emotions"
About this Quote
Roux folds a whole moral psychology into one clean paradox: emotions are the spark that makes a life look lit from within, and the same spark that can burn it down. The verb choices do the heavy lifting. "Vivifies" is not just "makes happy"; it suggests animation, a kind of breath entering the inert. Coming from a clergyman, that word quietly echoes spiritual language about the soul being enlivened. Then the line snaps shut with "kills", blunt and bodily. Roux yokes the sacred to the physiological, insisting that what feels most elevated can also be most lethal.
The intent is cautionary, but not puritanically anti-feeling. Roux isn't telling you to amputate your inner life; he's warning that emotions are power, not decoration. They can mobilize courage, devotion, tenderness - the energies that make faith and community real rather than performative. Yet the same machinery can drive obsession, jealousy, rage, and despair, not as abstract "sins" but as forces that corrode judgment and, in extreme cases, life itself.
Subtext: the moral life isn't a battle between reason and emotion; it's about governance. If you treat emotions as truth-tellers rather than weather systems, they'll run the household. In a clerical context, that lands as pastoral realism. Roux is speaking to the confessional and the pew: people don't just fail from cold calculation, they unravel from heat. His aphorism works because it refuses the comfort of a simple villain. The danger is also the engine.
The intent is cautionary, but not puritanically anti-feeling. Roux isn't telling you to amputate your inner life; he's warning that emotions are power, not decoration. They can mobilize courage, devotion, tenderness - the energies that make faith and community real rather than performative. Yet the same machinery can drive obsession, jealousy, rage, and despair, not as abstract "sins" but as forces that corrode judgment and, in extreme cases, life itself.
Subtext: the moral life isn't a battle between reason and emotion; it's about governance. If you treat emotions as truth-tellers rather than weather systems, they'll run the household. In a clerical context, that lands as pastoral realism. Roux is speaking to the confessional and the pew: people don't just fail from cold calculation, they unravel from heat. His aphorism works because it refuses the comfort of a simple villain. The danger is also the engine.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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